Chris Avellone

Chris Avellone ( AV-ə-lohn) is an American video game designer and comic book writer. He is known for his roles on a large number of video games, primarily role-playing video games, praised for their writing across his three-decade career. Avellone joined Interplay in 1995 and was one of the designers of Fallout 2 (1998) and the lead designer of Planescape: Torment (1999), the latter of which has been regarded as "one of the best-written and most imaginative video games ever created". After departing Interplay in 2003, he became one of the co-founders and the chief creative officer of Obsidian Entertainment, where he was the lead designer of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004) and a senior designer on Fallout: New Vegas (2010). From 2012 on, he was involved with some of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter, becoming known as a "human stretch goal". Avellone departed Obsidian in 2015 and has since worked as a freelancer for various companies on games such as Prey (2017), Divinity: Original Sin II (2017), Pathfinder: Kingmaker (2018), Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (2021). In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time and by Gamasutra as one of the top 20 game writers. In 2017, he was named by GamesTM as one of the then 50 most influential people in gaming.